Hasn’t the Twin Cities media – especially the “alternative”, liberal version – been barbering for years about how Rep. Michele Bachmann just doesn’t do “mainstream” media?

Why, yes – they have! 

But – did I hear Michele Bachmann doing an extended interview with Cathy Wurzer on MPR’s Morning Edition this morning?

Why, yes I did!

Someone tell Andy Birkey!

No, don’t.  Rather, tell Keith Ellison, Betty McCollum, Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, all of whom I’ve invited onto the Northern Alliance Radio Network in the past two years, none of whom have so much as responded.  (In the interest of completeness, note that Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak appeared, as did “Growth and Justice” majordomo Dane Smith.  We had a great time talking with both of ’em, because – shibboleths about conservative talk radio aside – Ed Morrissey and I will put our cross-aisle interviews up against anything in the commercial or public media today in terms of civility and fairness (while allowing that we are, in fact, conservative).

So whatdya say, Reps Ellison and McCollum?  How about it, Senators Franken and Klobuchar? 

For that matter, we’ve had an invite out to Common Cause Minnesota for six weeks now – submitted on this blog, via email, via a voice mail message, and on Twitter.  Not a word.

How about Denise Cardinal of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”?  Perhaps she could come on the show and discuss the Dayton-family-finance slime campaign she orchestrated?

For that matter, howzabout we get an invite to Mark Dayton?  I’ve heard Tom Emmer do a center-left show; d’ya suppose Dayton’s got the gumption to go across the aisle…

…like Representative Bachmann did?

The Hubert H. Humphrey Institute is a combination public-policy study program and think tank at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.  Named for the patriarch of the Democratic Farmer-Labor party – a forties-era amalgamation of traditional Democrats and neo-wobbly Farmer-Labor Union members whose Stalinist elements Humphrey famously purged in the mid-forties – the institution serves as a clearinghouse of soft-left chanting points and a retirement program for mostly left-of-center politicians and heelers.

The Institute has been doing general public opinion polling for years; in 2004, in conjunction with Minnesota Public Radio, they dove into the horserace game.

Let’s just sum up their performance in each of the five Presidential, Gubernatorial and Senate races they’ve polled in that time:

2004 Presidential Race

• HHH Poll:  Kerry 43, Bush 37
• Actual Election Results: Kerry 51, Bush 47
• Bush underrepresented by 10.61, Kerry by 8.09.

2006 Gubernatorial Race]

• HHH Poll: Hatch 45, Pawlenty 40
• Actual Election Results: Pawlenty 46.45.
• Pawlenty underrepresented by six, Hatch polled accurately.

2006 Senate Race

• HHH Poll: Klobuchar 54, Kennedy 34
• Actual Election Results: Klobuchar 58.06, Kennedy 37.94
• Kennedy underpolled by 3.94, Klobuchar by 4.06 – but it was a blowout.  We’ll come back to this.

2008 Presidential Election

• HHH Poll: Obama 56, Mccain 37
  
• Actual Election Results: Obama 54.2, McCain 44.
• Obama overrepresented almost two points; McCain, almost seven points under. A ten point race was portrayed as a 20 point landslide.

2008 US Senate Race

• HHH Poll: Franken 41, Coleman 37
• Actual Election Results: Franken by 41.99 to 41.98.
• Franken underrepresented by less than a point; Coleman, by almost five.  A tie race was portayed as a convincing five points beat-down.

2010 Governor Race

• HHH Poll: Dayton 41, Emmer 29.
• Actual Election: Dayton 43.63, Emmer 43.21, recount in progress.
• A tie race was depicted as a 12 point blowout.

A polling guru will say that these gross inaccuracies are a function of the Humphrey’s likely voter model – which for whatever reason assumed in each case that Democrats were much more likely to vote than Republicans, and likely to make up a greater portion of the electorate.

And yet the Humphrey Institute’s heuristics – the procedural, institutional and methodological rules by which institutions develop intelligence about things like voter behavior – seem to be stuck, for whatever reason, in the eighties.  The average HHH poll shows Republican candidates to be polling over five and a half points lower than Democrats in their real-life election performances.

Coincidence?

In five of the six races covered above, the errors in measurement underrepresented the GOP.  It’s an figure lower than that of the “Minnesota Poll” only because they’ve been in business sixty years fewer than the Strib’s poll.

Why would this be?

More next week.

In our next installment: I’ve shown you the behavior of both polls in horseraces across the board.  But a particularly interesting bit of behavior comes out if you throw out the blowouts – the 30 point massacre in the 1994 Governor race, the 20 points slaughter in the 2006 Senate contest – and focus on the tight races.

More on Wednesday.

———-

\The series so far:

Monday, 11/8: Introduction.

Wednesday, 11/10: Polling Minnesota – The sixty-six year history of the Strib’s Minnesota Poll. It offers some surprises.

Friday, 11/12: Daves, Goliath:  Rob Daves ran the Minnesota Poll from 1987 ’til 2007.  And the statistics during that era have a certain…consistency?

Monday, 11/15: Hubert, You Magnificent Bastard, I Read Your Numbers!:  The Humphrey Institute has been polling Minnesota for six years, now.  And the results are…interesting.  In the classic Hindi sense of the term.

Wednesday, 11/17: Close Shaves: Close races are the most interesting.  For everyone.  Including you, if you’re reading this series.

Friday, 11/19: The Hay They Make: So what does the media and the Twin Cities political establishment do with these numbers?

Monday, 11/22: A Million’s A Crowd:  Attention, statisticians:  Raw data!  Suitable for cloudsourcing!

Rob Daves took over the Minnesota Poll in 1987.

Rob Daves

I have never met Rob Daves.  Either, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone else.  I don’t know that his alt-media bete noir, Scott Johnson, has even met him, despite not a few requests for interviews.

I have no idea what Rob Daves thinks, believes, wants, says or does.  I know nothing about his personal life, and I really don’t want or need to.  For all I know, he’s a perfectly wonderful human being.

But for a 20 year period under his direction, the Minnesota Poll turned into an epic joke.

How epic?

The numbers don’t lie.

———-

During the Rob Daves years, party politics in Minnesota skittered all over the map.  The governors office started DFL, changed hands, and maybe have changed back last week – we’ll see.  The Reagan/Bush 41 era seesawed to Clinton, then Dubya, and now Obama; both Senate seats started Republican; both switched to the DFL, eventually.

There has, in short, been a lot of variety, at least in terms of the Party ID winning the various elections.

But the Minnesota Poll has been oddly homogenous.

Throughout the Rob Daves era, the Democratic or DFL candidate in Presidential, Gubernatorial and Senate races has gotten an average of 45.68% of the vote, to 45.21% for the GOP.  That’s very, very close.

Some of the races have been blowouts – Amy Klobuchar’s 20 point drubbing of Mark Kennedy, Arne Carlson’s 30 point hammering of John Marty – and some, like our 2008 Senate and 2010 Governor races, have been (or still are) painfully close.

But you’d never know it from the Minnesota poll. The average vote totals – between the blowouts and upsets and squeakers – during Daves’ 1987-2007 tenure favored the DFL, barely, by 45.98 to 45.34%.  But the Minnesota Polls released just before all those elections showed the population favoring the DFL by 43.33 to 39.89%.

And of 18 total contests, the polling inaccuracies skewed in the direction of the DFL in 15.   The average skew toward the DFL came to almost three percentage points.

When you break things out, the differences get wider; in the five Presidential elections, the Minnesota Poll discerned a 49.67 to 36% DFL lead; the actual results were 50.13 to 41.64%.  The Minnesota Poll underrepresented the GOP by an average of 5.64% in Presidential elections during the Daves years.   The Strib Poll showed every single GOP candidate coming up short of his actual election performance:  George HW Bush polled 3.80% light; Dole, 7.00%;  Dubya, 8.50 and 6.61; McCain also polled seven points under his real performance.  The Democrats, on the other hand, seemed to be polled fairly accurately; the average error poll  and election for Democratic presidential candidates was less than half a point.

The Senate races are a little closer – the Republicans underperform the election results 4.29% to 3.14%, a difference of 1.15% under their election results, which isn’t very significant – if you just look at raw numbers.  Well come back to that next Wednesday.

In the Gubernatorial races during the Daves years, though, the polling results were pretty lockstep. In gubernatorial races since 1987, the GOP has outpolled the DFL by an average of 46.77 to 38.91% – including one huge blowout (1994) and several squeakers.  But the Minnesota Poll has shown Minnesotans’ preferences at 40.17 to 36.67 in favor of the GOP.  Republicans’ performance was underpolled by 6.6% in the Minnesota poll – that of the DFL by only 2.24%.  The Minnesota poll showed Minnesotans underselecting Republicans by almost triple the margin of the actual elections.

A classic – and large – example was the 2002 Governor race.  The election-eve Minnesota Poll showed Pawlenty tipping Moe by 35-32.  The real margin was 44-36.  While the poll oversampled Independence Party candidate Tim Penny by a fairly impressive margin, the fact is that while the final MN Poll undershot Moe’s support by 4%, it underrepresented Pawlenty’s by nine solid points.

All in all, of the 20 Presidential, Senate and Gubernatorial races during the Daves era, 16 of them showed the Minnesota Poll underpolling the GOP by a greater degree than the DFL.

And that’s just counting all the races.

———-

Daves was let go at the Strib in 2007.  The Minnesota Poll was taken over by “Princeton Research Study Group”, which also does polling for Newsweek (whose polling is generally considered atrocious).

The 2008 races were very different, of course; the Senate race was a virtual tie, while Obama beat McCain handily.

But the day before the election, the Minnesota poll said McCain was polling just 37%; he ended up with 44%.  It overestimated Obama’s support by under a point, calling him at 55% when he got 54.2%.  The Minnesota Poll sandbagged Mac by seven points.

And Franken v. Coleman?   The day before the election, the poll showed Coleman almost four points below his actual performance (38% versus 41.98) ; it nailed Franken almost dead-on (42% i the poll, 41.99% by the time the recount was over).

PRSA showed both GOP candidates performing drastically off their real pace on election eve.

And three weeks ago, a week before the gubernatorial election, the Minnesota Poll showed Emmer at 34%; he got 43.21%.  Nine points better than the Minnesota poll indicated.

The upshot?  Of the 20 total election contests in the Rob Daves and PRSA eras, the Minnesota Poll has underpolled GOP support in 17 – 85% – of those races.

And PRSA polling has, on average, underpolled the GOP by 6.12% in those three elections.   In other words, PRSA’s errors have favored the DFL to the tune of six points – which is more than the three-plus points of the Rob Daves era.

One might think that random statistics would scatter on both sides of the middle more or less equally.  And in the first 42 years of the Minnesota poll, in aggregate, they did, as we showed Wednesday.

But during the Daves years, and continuing with PRSA, the errors developed a consistency – shorting Republicans – and grew in magnitude.

———-

Of course, those averages hide some big swings; some races in those averages were real blowouts.

It’s been my theory that the Minnesota Poll’s “peculiarities” are most pronounced during close elections.

We’ll test that out next Wednesday, when we’ll examine races that were decided by the proverbial cat’s whisker.

First – Monday – we’ll meet the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute Poll.

———-

The series so far:

Monday, 11/8: Introduction.

Wednesday, 11/10: Polling Minnesota – The sixty-six year history of the Strib’s Minnesota Poll. It offers some surprises.

Friday, 11/12: Daves, Goliath:  Rob Daves ran the Minnesota Poll from 1987 ’til 2007.  And the statistics during that era have a certain…consistency?

Monday, 11/15: Hubert, You Magnificent Bastard, I Read Your Numbers!:  The Humphrey Institute has been polling Minnesota for six years, now.  And the results are…interesting.

Wednesday, 11/17: Close Shaves: Close races are the most interesting.  For everyone.  Including you, if you’re reading this series.

Friday, 11/19: The Hay They Make: So what does the media and the Twin Cities political establishment do with these numbers?

Monday, 11/22: A Million’s A Crowd:  Attention, statisticians:  Raw data!  Suitable for cloudsourcing!

My interest in the Minnesota Poll as an individual institution started right about the time I started this blog, six or eight years ago.

Now bear in mind that I, Mitch Berg, have made skepticism of the media at least a hobby, if not a fringey living, since 1986.  I have believed that the media needed to be distrusted and then verified for pretty much my entire adult life.

And yet until very recently, I maintained, if not a naive faith in the public opinion polling about elections, at least a detached sense that, somehow or other, they all evened out.   It was the same naivete that we all have about where babies and Christmas presents come from when we’re nine, or how entitlements get paid for when we’re 18 (50 for Minnesota government employees), or how sausage and bacon are made.

Ignorance is, indeed, bliss.

The scales started falling from my eyes when I started reading PowerLine.  Scott Johnson has been keeping his eye of the MNPoll for most of a decade, now; he’s led the pack of Minnesota bloggers in documenting the poll’s abuses.

And in reading the history of conservative criticism of the Minnesota Poll, I started wondering – what is the historical context?

There’s more of it than I’d figured.

———-

The Star Tribune started running public opinion polling of the Minnesota electorate in 1944.  It’s polled Minnesotans over a variety of topics, but the marquee subjects are always the big three elections – State Governor, US Senate and Presidential elections.

Now, if you’ve lived in Minnesota in the past fifty years or so (I go back half of that time – I moved here in ’85), it’s hard to believe that Minnesota used to be a largely Republican state.  Of course, the Republicans we had up until very recently were the type that make the likes of Lori Sturdevant grunt with approval – “progressive” Republicans like Elmer Anderson and Wheelock Whitney and the like.

I bring this up to note that while the various parties have changed – Republicans used to be “progressive”, Democrats used to be “America First” – that Minnesota party politics for the past 66 years have been a little more evenly-matched than current political consciousness – shaped as its been by Humphrey and Mondale and “Minnesota Miracle” and Wellstone and Carlson – might make you believe.

Now, if you look at the Minnesota Poll’s statistics for the past 66 years – going back to the 1944 elections, for Governor, Senator and President – the Minnesota Poll is actually fairly even.  In that time, Republicans have gotten an average of 46.85 percent of the vote for all those offices, to 49.37% for DFLers.  During that time, the Minnesota Poll’s “election eve” predictions have averaged 44.1% for Republicans, and 46.77% for Democrats.  That means that over history, the big final Minnesota Poll has shown Republicans doing 2.75 points worse than they turned out, with DFLers coming in 2.59 points worse than they finally turned out.  The results have tended to be, over the course of 66 years, infinitesimally more accurate – .16% – for Democrats.  It’s insignificant, truly.

Indeed, when you go through the numbers from the forties and the fifties, you can see some blogger back in 1958 decrying two things – the lack of an internet to blog on, and a serious pro-Republican bias in the Minnesota poll; in polls run before 1960, the Minnesota poll predicted Republicans would get 51.58, while GOP candidates for the big three offices actually got 50.32% of the vote – the poll overestimated Republicans by an average of 1.26%.  The DFL got an average of 49.73% of the vote during those years, while the Minnesota Poll had them at an average of 43.51% –  which is 6.22% lower than they actually turned out doing (although this number gets inflated by a truly horrible performance in the 1948 Gubernatorial election, where the MNPoll had John Halstead at 25% in their pre-election poll; he ended up losing, but with 45%. That had to be frustrating).  In all, before 1960, the Strib “Minnesota Poll”‘s pre-election poll overestimated the GOP’s performance compared to the DFL’s in 76% of elections; the poll’s overestimates favored the GOP by an average of almost 7.5%.

By the mid-sixties, of course, Minnesota politics changed drastically; by the middle of the decade, the golden age of “progressive” politics and the DFL, led by the likes of Hubert H. Humphrey and Walter Mondale for the DFL, and Elmer Anderson for the GOP, left Minnesota a very different state.  During those years – from about 1966, after Barry Goldwater re-introduced a partisan divide to national politics for the first time, really, since the war – the DFL won the average vote 50.97 to 46.61.  The Minnesota Poll predicted DFL victories, on average, of 49.62 to 42.79; they underreported the final support for Republicans by an average of 3.83%, and DFLers by 1.35%, an average skew of almost 2.5% in favor of the DFL.

But if you look at the actual elections covered in those years – from 1966 to 1990, the “Golden Age of the DFL” – of the 21 contests for President, Governor and Senator, the Minnesota Poll showed the Democrat doing better than they turned out doing by a greater margin than the Republican in 13 of the elections, and inflating the GOP candidates results in eight.  The 1980 Presidential election skewed things a bit – the MNPoll underestimated Jimmy Carter’s performance by 12.5% (Carter got 46.5%, while the MNPoll predicted 34%; it also overestimated Reagan’s performance by a little over a point, leading to one of the biggest pro-Republican skews in the recent history of the Minnesota Poll).

Overall, for the entire history of the Minnesota Poll from 1944 to 1986, the Minnesota Poll showed the public voting, on election eve, for the DFL by a 48.25% to 46.34% average margin; the actual elections favored the DFL to 51.10 47.81; the poll underpolled Republicans by a 1.47% average, and Democrats by an average of 2.85%.  Of the 41 total contests in that time, the DFL was overestimated by a greater margin than the GOP in 44% of the polls – again, not a really significant number.

In other words, the poll’s statistical vicissitudes were fairly balanced through its first 42 years.

But in 1987, the Strib hired Rob Daves to run the Minnesota Poll.

And things would change.

———-

The series so far:

Monday, 11/8: Introduction.

Wednesday, 11/10: Polling Minnesota – The sixty-six year history of the Strib’s Minnesota Poll. It offers some surprises.

Friday, 11/12: Daves, Goliath:  Rob Daves ran the Minnesota Poll from 1987 ’til 2007.  And the statistics during that era have a certain…consistency?

Monday, 11/15: Hubert, You Magnificent Bastard, I Read Your Numbers!:  The Humphrey Institute has been polling Minnesota for six years, now.  And the results are…interesting.

Wednesday, 11/17: Close Shaves: Close races are the most interesting.  For everyone.  Including you, if you’re reading this series.

Friday, 11/19: The Hay They Make: So what does the media and the Twin Cities political establishment do with these numbers?

Monday, 11/22: A Million’s A Crowd:  Attention, statisticians:  Raw data!  Suitable for cloudsourcing!

The weekend before the election, I was talking with a friend – a woman who has become a newly-minted conservative in the past two years.  She’d sat out the 2008 election, and had voted for Kerry in ’04, but finally became alarmed about the state of this nation’s future – she’s got kids – and got involved with the Tea Party and started paying attention to politics.  And she was going to vote conservative.  Not Republican, mind you, but conservative.

And the Saturday before the election, she sounded discouraged.  “Have you seen the polls?” she asked.  “Emmer’s gonna get clobbered”.

I set her straight, of course – referred her to my blog posts debunking the election-eve Humphrey and Minnesota polls.and showing her the Emmer campaign internal poll that showed the race a statistical dead heat (which, obviously, was the most correct poll before election day).

She left the room feeling better.  She voted for Emmer.  And she voted for her Republican candidates in her State House and Senate districts, duly helping flip her formerly blue district to the good guys and helping gut Dayton’s agenda, should he (heaven forefend) win the recount.

But I walked away from that meeting asking myself – what about all the thousands of newly-minted conservatives who don’t have the savvy or inclination to check the cross-tabs?  The thousands who saw those polls, and didn’t have access to a fire-breathing conservative talk show host with a keen BS detector who’s learned to read the fine print?

How many votes did Tom Emmer lose because of the Hubert H. Humphrey and Minnesota polls that showed him trailing by insurmountable margins?

How many votes to conservatives and Republicans lose in every election due to these polls’ misreporting?

Why do these two polls seem so terribly error-prone?  And why do those errors always seem to favor the Democrats, with the end result of discouraging Republican voters?

Coincidence?

———-

Public opinion polling is the alchemy of the post-renaissance age.  Especially “likely voter” polling; every organization that runs a poll has a different way of taking the hundreds or thousands of responses they get, and classifying the respondents as “likely” or not to vote, and tabulating those results into a snapshot of how people are thinking about an election at a given moment.

But the Star Tribune’s Minnesota Poll has, to the casual observer, a long history of coming out with polls that seem to short Republicans – especially conservative ones – every single election.  And the relative newcomer to the regional polling game, the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute’s poll done in conjunction with Minnesota Public Radio, seems – again, anecdotally (so far) to take that same approach and supercharge it.

I’ve had this discussion in the past – David Brauer of the MinnPost and I had a bit of a back and forth on the subject, on-line and on the Northern Alliance one Saturday about a month ago.

And so it occurred to me – it’s easy to come up with anecdotes, one way or another.  But how do the numbers really stack up?   If you dig into the actual numbers for the Humphrey Institute and the Minnesota Poll, what do they say?

I’ll be working on that for the next couple of weeks.  Here’s the plan:

http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/?p=15172

I was driving around on Friday and caught this story, by MPR’s Curtis Gilbert, on the 1990 Minnesota gubernatorial election.  The contest was an epic donnybrook, with a sex scandal taking out the GOP endorsed candidate, leaving Arne Carlson to sweep in and defeat the DFL endorsed candidate Rudy Perpich, who had his own issues.

At any rate, Gilbert tagged the story…:

But Smith said the most dire predictions made in the aftermath of the 1990 governor’s race never materialized. Many observers said the election signaled a new era of dirty politics.

But as this year’s governor’s race demonstrated, Minnesota is still capable of holding a campaign focused on the issues.

Issues?

Mark Dayton’s entire stock of campaign “issues” involved

• bagging on “the rich” (comfortable in the knowledge that nobody in the media would press him publicly on what “the rich” were)
• a budget plan that never got within a billion dollars of “balanced”
• a few weeks of intense concern about “trackers”.

That was pretty much it.

Except for six months of toxic sleaze from Alliance for a Better Minnesota, focusing mainly on a couple of 20 year old drinking-while-driving charges and relentless lying about his (actual) budget plan, and an astroturf campaign against businesses that dared to defy the DFL.

In its own way, this campaign has been as sleazy as 1990.

There are so many unanswered questions about Mark Dayton.

Now, if we had an institution in our state whose job it was to ask tough questions of those who would tax our earnings and spend our money and run the free association of equals that We The People call our government – say, a big organization with a long tradition of asking questions, with Codes of Ethics and printing presses and TV and radio transmitters, for example – perhaps some of these questions might have been asked or, at the very least, asked consistently and clearly after, say Labor Day, when the vast majority of non-political junkies tune in to the subject of politics.

But we apparently have no such institutions in Minnesota.  So nobody was able to ask…

• Why did Mark Dayton quit his teaching job in mid-year, after working about 1/3 of the time a real teacher would have? And let’s be clear -0 when I say “nobody” was able to ask, I mean Sheila Kihne, housewife and mom and blogger, asked.  She asked questions about Dayton’s resume, his education, and his many breaks from his rigorous teaching schedule in NYC to participate in protest rallies in the Twin Cities.  The rest of the media?  Not quite so much.
• Who Is Financing All Those Attack Ads: It was all right there in plain sight; “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” the group behind most of Mark Dayton’s attack ads, was financed largely by friends of Mark Dayton, and Mark Dayton himself.  Curious?  It was, briefly, to Tom Scheck of MPR, who was nearly alone among the Twin Cities media in covering ABM’s background at all, and even that long before the vast majority of Minnesotans cared.
• How About All That Erratic Behavior?:  Emmer’s two “DUIs” – actually “Careless Driving” convictions in 1980 and 1990 – received slavering coverage.  But Dayton’s apparently meltdown in office, culminating in his departure from the 2006 Senate campaign, apparently weren’t something the public had a “right to know”.  Not even given reports that he’d had alcoholic relapses in office and at least once since leaving office.  And rumors of his battle with mental illness continue to go unexamined, except via the most collegial sort of questions from the media – and again, this started and ended long before the voting public really started caring about this campaign, so even the tiny wedges of perfunctory coverage – a Rachel Stassen-Berger/Baird Helgeson piece that ran on the Sunday after Christmas of last year – if not the least-read news weekend of the year, certainly a contender.  Given that this is the extent of any recent coverage in Minnesota’s “newspaper of record”, it’d be charitable to say the Strib “buried” the story by giving it the most ludicrous possible minimum exposure possible while actually writing anything at all.
• Dayton’s serial budget shortfalls: The Twin Cities’ media questioned Dayton about the serial shortcomings in his various budget plans in only the most cursory, perfunctory way possible.  There were certainly questions – I’ve had a couple dozen myself, and I’m just a lowly blogger.  And yet the questions about Dayton’s plans – the racist gutting of charter schools, the illlusory reliance on halving state contractors for $425 million of savings that can not be realized, the simple fact that the entire plan is dead on arrival at the new, likely much-more-conservative legislature – none of these questions got any serious examination from a Twin Cities media that seems more intent on breaking the DFL’s generation long losing streak than in the public’s “right to know” any but the most cursory, trivial and meaningless factoids about Dayton’s plan.

If you were a banker, and Dayton sat before you peddling his record as collateral for a loan, you’d tell him to come back in a year when he’d built up some decent credit.

He shouldn’t get to build that credit on our time and with our money.

Previous Reasons Dayton Should Not Be Governor

• #4: Thrice Bitten
• #5: We Are Better Than This

We don’t know how the Minnesota gubernaturial election is going to turn out yet.  I have my predictions in; you are welcome to do your own.

But one thing is for certain; it’s not going to be a 12 point race.

Which would provoke a curious person to ask; what is with the “Star/Tribune Minnesota Poll” and the “MPR/Hubert H. Humphrey Institute Polls”?

This week, they showed results for the gubernatorial election (MNPoll had Dayton +7, HHH had Dayton +12) that, I assert, may not actually be intended as DFL morale-builders – but if they were, it’d be hard to show how they’d be different.  Their oversample of Democrat “likely voters” may or may not be built on experience in Minnesota elections – but it doesn’t take a keen-eyed journalist to see that their methodology is drastically wrong.  Indeed, there are those who are taking that look; Jake Grovum at PIM does a good job of BS-detecting; he covers ground Ed and I have covered on the show as well as our various blogs over the past few months; it’s well worth a read.

And it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to look at the record of both of these polls and at least suspect that they smell a rat.  The Minnesota Poll has a 20-plus year record of showing DFL gubernatorial and Senate candates faring an average of 7.5% stronger on the eve of the election than they actually perform. I need to go over the figures for the Humphrey poll, but off the top of my head I do know that the HHH showed Mike Hatch leading by six points at this time in the ’06 campaign; somehow, Tim Pawlenty did seven points better than that.

It’s not that I’m qualified to bag on the inner workings of the statistician’s game; I dropped the class after one week in college.

But when you have…:

• a twenty year history with the Strib/MNPoll, and a growing history with the HHH poll, of…
• …errors in methodology in polling that consistently result in 6-7 point polling errors…
• …just happen to consistently – as in, without exception – favor the DFL candidate in close, important elections (forget about the 2006 Senate race), and which are…
• …lavishly publicized at the beginning of the elections’ “get out the vote” phases…
• …by the respective  sponsoring news and academic organizations, both of whomcan be accused – perhaps unfairly but definitely rationally – of having group cultures that favor, implicitly or explicitly, the party that is the consistent (invariable!) beneficiary of the statistical error, cycle after cycle after cycle…

…well, that strikes me as an interesting story.

Now, it’s been made clear to me in this election cycle that the elite of the Twin Cities political media establishment – the Rachel Stassen-Bergers and Tom Schecks and Bill Salisburys and Pat Kesslers and David Brauers and Erik Blacks and Tim Pugmires who do the heavy lifting at political coverage for the major regional media – don’t like mere peasants with blogs kibitzing about how they do their jobs, to say nothing about their story timing and selection.

But if I were a journalist (pardon the blasphemy – tis a silly thought), this woudl strike me a subject worthy of some scrutiny.

Perhaps even…investigation!

But I suspect that job will be left to us mere unlettered peasants, in our spare time, over the next two years.

Just saying.

HHH Institute?  Princeton Research? Strib?  MPR?  Expect a phone call in early December.

Another MPR/HHH Poll. Another lopsided sample.  Another improbably huge Dayton lead.

Another day in a city where the media and academy actively work with the dominant political party to maintain control.

According the poll, which has a margin or sampling error between 3.6 percent and 5.5 percent and surveyed 751 likely voters, Dayton had support from 41 percent of those voters, Republican Tom Emmer had support from 29 percent and Independence Party’s Tom Horner had 11 percent.

Blah blah blah.

Rachel Stassen-Berger did manage to put this rather key fact in paragraph three, rather than buried under the fold as in most coverage of these DFL morale-builders (emphasis added):

The poll’s sample includes 45 percent Democrats, 38 percent Republicans and 16 percent independents. The percentages for both the Democrats and the Republicans are higher than recent Star Tribune Minnesota Polls, which had a sample that included roughly a third of voters in each category.

I’m not saying there’s collusion between the HHH (although Emmer would cut higher ed funding), MPR (whose state subsidy Emmer favors cutting) and the Star/Tribune (which has been audibly slavering for a DFL governor) to try to get out DFL votes.

But if they were colluding, I’m not sure how these polls would be any differnet, or differently-timed.

The Star Tribune‘s “Minnesota Poll” continues to serve its primary function – manipulating voter turnout.

As always with the MNPoll, the marquee numbers are nearly meaningless;

Dayton has strengthened his lead to 41 percent, according to the poll, followed by Emmer at 34 percent. Horner, who has struggled to get out of the teens in all public polls, is at 13 percent. That’s down from a peak of 18 percent last month.

The poll was conducted between Oct. 18 and 21 among 999 likely Minnesotans voters on both land-line and cell phones. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

No, it’s the crosstab numbers that matter  It’s buried on the second page of the online report, naturally:

In this poll, the sample of likely voters consisted of 34 percent Democrats, 31 percent independents and 30 percent Republicans.

Four percent overpoll of Democrats?  This year?

The poll is of 999 “likely voters” – and it’s there that the methodology goes from “reporting” to , as David Brauer puts it, the “secret sauce”.

[the poll is] based on 804 land-line and 402 cell phone interviews conducted Oct. 18-21 with a representative sample of Minnesota adults. Of that sample, 999 were deemed to be likely voters, and the poll results are based on those respondents.

And there’s the detail in which the Devil is.  How does Princeton Research (the company that actually does the Strib’s polling) take those 1,200 likely voters and “deem” 1,000 or so of them to be “likely”?

We don’t know.  None of the major pollsters will say.

The article, by Rachel Stassen-Berger, goes on to squeeze in a puff piece for Dayton.

We really know two things:

The Minnesota Poll has, for a generation, always shown Republicans behind the week before the election, sometimes by ludicrious amounts, when they went on to win.

And the Minnesota Poll’s errors immediately before elections inevitably appear designed to drive down Republican turnout in elections that every other pollster in the business shows to be incredibly tightly contested.

It is time for someone to investigate the Strib’s polling operations, both under Princeton Research and, before 2007, under Rob Daves.  If Emmer wins – and I predict he will, by a three point margin – it’ll be further proof that the Minnesota poll is nothing a get out the DFL vote/suppress the GOP vote effort.

The deniablity is plausible – but only just.

The Duluth News-Tribune – a traditionally left-leaning paper in a traditionally left-leaning district – Ou endorses Republican challenger Chip Cravaack over 18-term incumbent DFLer Jim Oberstar.

While giving a nod to Oberstar’s “achievements”, and acknowledging his vote for Clinton’s  “debt reduction” bill in 1993 (that relied on tax hikes more than spending cuts), the DNT notes that these are different times:

But there’s also no escaping the chilling reality of our nation’s economic state. Unemployment hovers around 10 percent, despite stimulus and other efforts to turn the tide. Health-care reform has companies warning employees of the likelihood of increased health-insurance costs. A pair of wars rages. And the national debt stands at a staggering $13.6 trillion and is increasing at an alarming rate of $3.8 billion a day.

The brake pedal of fiscal responsibility is needed in Washington now as much as ever. Although Oberstar voted in 1993 for the biggest debt reduction in post-World War II history, the 17-term incumbent is hardly the embodiment of financial restraint and new direction.

And they figure – as I do – that Chip’s the guy for the times, and the job:

His opponent, on the other hand, Republican Chip Cravaack, represents what Congress, including Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District, needs at this critical crossroads in American history. A pro-business, fiscally conservative, former Navy captain, with a master’s degree in education, Cravaack has smarts. He is articulate, reasoned and composed. More critically, he has specific and promising strategies to pull the nation out of its financial funk.

“This is clearly unsustainable,” Cravaack said last week of our nation’s mounting debt and free-spending ways. “The best thing to correct the situation is to create a business-friendly environment where the private sector creates jobs.”

This is huge – justifying a rare Sunday posting from me.

I’m going to be releasing my election predictions tomorrow.  And while I’ve believed for a week that Cravaack was could pull off the upset of the year – nationally! – this is another log on the fire.

From Blois Olson’s “Morning Take“: word has it that the Duluth News Tribune is doing to do the unthinkable:

Sources close to the CD8 campaign of Republican Chip Cravaack are telling people that on Sunday the Duluth News Tribune will endorse his candidacy to replace Democrat Rep. Jim Oberstar.

I’m not going to write “Developing…” at the end of this post – good lord, what kind of hapless dork do you think I am? – but I’ll be following this very, very closely.

I’m starting to feel really optimistic about Cravaack’s shot, here.

Humans profile.  Every last one of us.

Don’t believe me?

If you’re a middle-class black American, and you see a bunch of people who scream “Latino gang-banger” up ahead, do you modify your behavior?

If you’re an openly gay American, and you see a group of guys in mullets mulling about showing signs of obvious angry intoxication up ahead, do you find an alternate route?

If you’re a couple of NPR listeners, in your alpaca and tweed and too-perfectly-gray hair, and a bunch of Hells Angels walk into the gas station as you’re looking for an air freshener for your Prius, do you get out of the way?

You all do, of course.  Because while none of you may like to discriminate against other human beings, our self-preservation reflex recognizes threats.  It’s human nature.

And when you get on a plane?  Yep – young men who look middle eastern rate a second glance.  Maybe more.  It’s because humans are hardwired to try not to get killed.

I do it.  You do it, no matter what kind of mewling liberal PCBot you think you are. And Juan Williams did it – and made the mistake of offending his holier-than-thou masters at NPR.

Yesterday NPR fired me for telling the truth. The truth is that I worry when I am getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims.

This is not a bigoted statement. It is a statement of my feelings, my fears after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by radical Muslims. In a debate with Bill O’Reilly I revealed my fears to set up the case for not making rash judgments about people of any faith. I pointed out that the Atlanta Olympic bomber —  as well as Timothy McVeigh and the people who protest against gay rights at military funerals — are Christians but we journalists don’t identify them by their religion.

To be fair, both belong/ed to sects of Christianity just a little relatively far out on the fringe than Wahabbism.

But here’s the important part:

And I made it clear that all Americans have to be careful not to let fears lead to the violation of anyone’s constitutional rights, be it to build a mosque, carry the Koran or drive a New York cab without the fear of having your throat slashed. Bill and I argued after I said he has to take care in the way he talks about the 9/11 attacks so as not to provoke bigotry.

Which is something most Americans of all creeds believe.  The US is still the best place on earth to be a Muslim.

National Public Radio seems to see itself as a benign national thought police.

Maybe it should fund itself…

Mark Dayton has run one of the single dumbest campaigns in Minnesota history.

Dayton himself has been a virtual non-entity, relying on the Twin Cities’ media’s inability and/or unwillingness to question him on  his background, the immense gaps in his budget “plan”, his history of erratic behavior…anything.

His surrogates have been another matter entirely; “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – whose financing, almost exclusively from big union donors and members and ex-members of Mark Dayton’s family of trust fund babies – has run the slimiest, most defamatory campaign in Minnesota political history.   From mischaracterizing Emmer’s “DUI” record and slandering his efforts to reform Minnesota DUI laws, to their outright lies about his budget, ABM has profaned this state’s politics in a way that I only hope can be salvaged in the future – although I doubt this will happen until the DFL decays to third-party status.

If it were a Republican group doing it, the Dems would be whining about “voter intimidation”.

The Dayton campaign, in short, has been not so much a campaign as an attempt to orchestrate negative projected PR, social inertia and the ignorance of most voters to their advantage.  It hasn’t been a dumb campaign, per se;  when your job is to sell Mark Dayton, “The Bumbler”, desperate situations call for desperate measures.  And as we saw in 1998, there are enough stupid people do make anything possible.

A big part of Dayton’s under-the-table campaign has been to portray the impression that Dayton’s coronation is inevitable.  If your nature is to be suspicious of institutions with long, arguably circumstantial records of bias, one might see the Minnesota Poll as an instrument toward that aim – given its three-decade record of showing DFLers doing an average of 7.5% better than they ended up doing.   (If you favor the Democrats, you might say the same about Rasmussen – if you ignored the fact that they’ve been consistently the most accurate major pollster for the last couple of cycles.  Other than that, just the same thing).

The latest chapter in this campaign has been the regional DFLbloggers’ chanting the latest results from Nate Silver’s “Five Thirty Eight”, a political stats-blog that was bought out by the NYTimes a while back.

Silver’s latest look at the Minnesota gubernatorial race gives Dayton an 83% chance of winning, in a six point race.

And that’s where the Sorosbloggers leave it.

Of course, Silver’s analysis on its face has a margin of error of a little over eight points – which is  – considerably larger than the forecast margin.

Of course, with any statistical, numerical output, you have to ask yourself – “are the inputs correct?”

Here are Silver’s inputs:

Courtesy 538/New York Times

The important column is the “538 Poll Weight” column, the third from the right.  It shows how much weight Silver gives each poll in his final calculation.  The number is at least partly tied to time – but not completely; for some reason, the five-week old Survey USA poll gets 20% more weight than the four week old Rasmussen poll; the October 6 Rasmussen poll that showed Emmer with a one point lead gets about 3/4 the oomph of the latest Survey USA poll, which showed Dayton with a five point lead…

…and whose “likely voter model” seemed to think that Democrats are four points more likely to show up at the polls that Republicans.  This year.

Pollsters – and Silver – are fairly cagey about their methodology.  I’m not a statistics wiz.  I dropped the class after one week, in fact.  But I can tell when something isn’t passing the stink test.  Any poll that gives Democrats a four point edge in turnout this year may or may not be wishful thinking (we’ll find out in less than two weeks, won’t we?), but does seem to be based more on history than current behavior which, I should point out, involves a lot of hocus-pocus to predict during a normal election.

And this is not a normal election.

I’m not going to impugn Nate Silver, per se – if only because I haven’t the statistical evidence.  Yet.

I will, impugn the NYTimes, but then that’s what I do.  They very much do want to drive down Republican turnout.

And that is the main reason the DFL machine – including the ranks of more-or-less kept leftybloggers in this state – are parrotting this “story” so dutifully.  They want to convince Republicans that all is lost.

Pass the word, folks.  We’re gonna win this thing.

“Let’s make sure nobody who isn’t supposed to vote, votes”.

Let’s see which leftyblogger is the first to say that I’m “supporting voter intimidation”.

Because it seems they do set the bar that low.

In and among the Pioneer Press’ drearily-predictable chain of DFL endorsements (which seem largely to be based on the idea of bringing more state pork to their respective districts) came this news yesterday; they endore Doug Wardlow over DFL incumbent Mike Obermuller in House District 38B.

Doug Wardlow said he wants Minnesota to be a “bulwark against encroachment by the federal government” and to assert its rights as a “sovereign government.” He said Minnesota should join the suit seeking to challenge the new federal health reform law and said he would seek to balance the state’s budget without a statewide tax increase. “We need to figure out how to do more with less,” he said.

Obermueller said legislators cannot go to St. Paul with their “mind made up” on critical issues. He said he tries to listen carefully and be a “bridge” between the two parties. He argues for a “balanced approach” the budget deficit and cautions against anti-government rhetoric.

Two capable and articulate candidates make this a tough call. We give a slight advantage to the challenger, Doug Wardlow, whose impressive resume includes work on international trade issues in Washington. We endorse Doug Wardlow for House District 38B; his conservative voice will be a welcome addition to the diversity of opinion at the Capitol.

We’ve interviewed Doug on the NARN, and I’ve appeared with him at fundraisers for Diane Anderson (who is in her second run for 38A against Sandra Masin, in a race where the PiPress declined to endorse – which has to be a cold, decaying slap in the face for Masin in and of itself).  While this blog does not “endorse”, I concur completely; let’s get Doug into the House!

From the Strib endorsement of “Indpendence” Party former-Republican-who’s-turned-into-a-moderate-DFLer-who-had-to -join-the-IP-because-the-DFL-has-become-so-freaking-extreme Tom Horner:

Not since Elmer L. Andersen in 1960 has a successful business owner and CEO left a prominent Minnesota firm to seek the governorship. Like Andersen, Horner, the cofounder of the Himle Horner public-relations firm, is doing so for the best of reasons: He loves Minnesota; he’s a serious student of government and economics, and he feels called to service. At age 60, Horner seeks to apply the lessons of a lifetime spent working in and around public policy to the restoration of this state’s vitality.

Nick Coleman, on Twitter:

Mr. Horner: I KNEW Elmer Andersen and (my father) SERVED with Elmer Andersen and you are NO Elmer Andersen. Not sure Elmer would vote 4 you.

Listening to DFL holdovers from the sixties, like Coleman and Lori Sturdevant, yammering about what the politicians of Minnesota’s putative golden age reminds me of scholars cloistered in a medieval back room debating how many angels could sit on the head of a pin.

Remember last spring?

When leftybloggers and the local and national media were scouring behind every dandelion for “racist tea partiers?   When the standard of “proof” was “suspicious ambiguity?”

As most of us who actually attended Tea Party rallies knew, it was all crap.

And now we have proof:

A new analysis of political signs displayed at a tea party rally in Washington last month reveals that the vast majority of activists expressed narrow concerns about the government’s economic and spending policies and steered clear of the racially charged anti-Obama messages that have helped define some media coverage of such events.

And there’s your thesis – the media has used whatever “racist” signs they did find to paint their entire coverage of the conservative revolution.   The gullible and/or depraved lefty “alternative” media has run with that meme, naturally.

Ekins’s conclusion is not that the racially charged messages are unimportant but that media coverage of tea party rallies over the past year have focused so heavily on the more controversial signs that it has contributed to the perception that such content dominates the tea party movement more than it actually does.

“Really this is an issue of salience,” Ekins said. “Just because a couple of percentage points of signs have those messages doesn’t mean the other people don’t share those views, but it doesn’t mean they do, either. But when 25 percent of the coverage is devoted to those signs, it suggests that this is the issue that 25 percent of people think is so important that they’re going to put it on a sign, when it’s actually only a couple of people.”

Conservatives can expect the media to slander us.  But it’s good to fight it.

John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson responded to my story last week about the internal polling in District 32B.

Scott adds a note of cautious sobriety:

Over the weekend John noted Mitch Berg’s assertion regarding a possible Republican surge in a part of Minnesota’s Third Congressional District (House District 32B). The poll in 32B that Mitch cited should actually raise a cautionary warning for the campaign of Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer.

Let’s be absolutely clear, here; caution is definitely in order.

We’ll come back to that.

Comparing the poll numbers to the 2008 electoral results in the same state House district, Emmer is running 7 points behind Rep. Erik Paulsen, 9 points behind John McCain and 12 points behind Republican State Rep. and House Minority Leader Kurt Zellers.

Right.

The point of the story isn’t that all is rosy for Emmer, even in this district.

The point was that things are better than some of the media’s been portraying them.

Emmer, however, is in a serious three-way race. Perhaps the best comparison is to the 2006 gubernatorial election, in which Tim Pawlenty also faced a strong Democratic challenger (Mike Hatch) and an Independence Party candidate (Peter Hutchinson). Pawlenty drew 55 percent of the vote in 32B; Zellers drew 48.5 percent. Pawlenty did nearly 8 points better in 32B than he did statewide…This is an area in which a Republican gubernatorial candidate has to rack up the vote if he is going to win the election.

Comparisons with 2006 are useful, but not airtight.  Tom Horner is a much stronger candidate than Hutchinson was – although in the end he’ll sap  more from Dayton than Emmer.

It is time for a gut check in the Emmer campaign. The campaign is not going well, and the campaign leadership needs to wake up. The situation is not dissimilar to the situation in the 2008 Senate recount. The Coleman campaign buried its head in the sand about the need to play hardball. I am told Emmer’s campaign thinks it is on track, but the numbers in 32B don’t support their belief. The Emmer campaign needs to run as if it is 10 points behind Mark Dayton.

And there, Scott is right.  And my point wasn’t to make the Emmer campaign feel complacent.  Indeed, my point isnt’ aimed at the campaign at all.  I’m not Power Line or Hot Air; nobody in any position of power reads me.   I’m just Shot In The Dark. My audience is a whole lot of workadaddy, hugamommy Minnesota conservative voters.

Voters who have been the target of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s” fraudulent attacks on Emmer’s ethics and character in their “DUI” ads.

Voters who are the targets of the Twin Cities’ in-the-bag-for-the-DFL media when they bend over backwards to give the voters all the news that fits (the media and DFL’s narrative) about Emmer.

Voters who are the targets of the perennially ludicrous Minnesota Poll.

They are targeted because the DFL knows Dayton is a pair of threes – a terrible Senator, a man with an exceptionally dodgy personal history – and they know that their only hope is to keep Republicans home, or inveigle them to vote for Tom Horner.

They need to convince Minnesota conservatives that there is no hope.

To the extent that the current polling is accurate, it reflects that this effort has been successful.

So far.

And yet there is hope.  And yes, while Emmer’s had an exceptionally rough campaign, this is winnable.

I’m saying Emmer by three.  I’m going to do my damnedest to make sure every conservative – of every party – and everyone who might not be a conservative, but can read the numbers and can see the disaster Dayton would be, comes out on November 2.

And I’m not going to let the media and Mark Dayton’s hacks – paid and otherwise – have any of those voters jumping off the ledge.

But if I were, I’d have a bunch of questions of Mark Dayton, his campaign, and the maze of PACs and organizations that are bankrolling his campaign.

Let’s start at the top:

1. Settle Me This: So how much did you pay in your settlement to Brad Hanson? Since you were employed by the Senate, is it correct to assume that it was originally paid by the taxpayer – is that a fair assumption?  When did you agree to pay the settlement off yourself – specifically, before or after you won the primary?  Why did you litigate this case for a solid half-decade, all the way to the US Supreme Court?
2. Why So Angry?: While Tom Emmer has been almost over-the-top in his civility and positivity – refusing to even call you “The Opposition” in a radio interview last September, on the ideal that we all need to be on the same side eventually – your campaign is distinguished by having been almost entirely negative.  Your campaign has been heavy on witch-hunting (“tax the rich!”, references to Bush and Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty), scapegoating (“the rich”) and the occasional assurance that you are, indeed, part of some sort of Minnesota tradition.   And your campaign’s main mouthpiece, Alliance for a Better Minnesota, has run an absolute slime-fest – lying and/or mangling the context of Emmer’s criminal record, proposed education budget, and voting record.  Do you have a positive vision for your proposed administration?  Please state it.  Take your time, we can wait.
3. What’s A Billion Or So Among Friends?: Your first attempt at a budget came up three billion dollars shy of solving the deficit.  Your second attempt is at least $890 million short, and given that even MPR figured out that you can’t cut $425 million in contractors without changing a lot of laws and regulations, it’s pretty likely to be well over a billion again.  Since you’re already soaking the rich, and you really are committed to not cutting a whole lot (since government is mostly sacred cows that are an integral part of your political base), what alternative do you have to soaking the middle class?
4. Let Them Eat Food Stamps!: Your program looks, at best, to be a minor boon to state workers, and at the very, very best a hit to private employment.  Where and how does your plan facilitate private-sector job creation in Minnesota?  In fact, can you respond to the idea that further hikes on taxes will hamper private job creation?
5. Between The Ears: The hit campaign run by your various PAC supporters has tried to paint Tom Emmer as temperamental.  OK – let’s talk temperament. Six years ago today you closed your Senate office.  You were branded “the Bumbler” by Time Magazine, which normally effuses for liberals.  In the aftermath of the 9/11 commission hearings, you launched a thousand conspiracy theories against the Bush administration, the Pentagon and the FAA for political purposes.  You’ve been treated for depression, and are a recovering alcoholic that’s had two relapses in the past decade.  Given your surrogates’ assaults on Tom Emmer, how can you say you are temperamentally suited to serve as governor?  And by the way, what is the nature of your current treatment for depression?  And while you don’t have to answer, I need to ask; what is your current DSM-IV classification?
6. Paperwork!: You have opposed alternative teacher licensure – and yet your career as a teacher in New York , which you’ve chosen to make a key part of your public-service image, was made possible by alternative licensing.  Please resolve this bit of cognitive dissonance.
7. Paperwork, Paperwork, Paperwork: Speaking of your teaching career, what coursework did you complete at U of Massachusetts Amherst?  Could you release a transcript?
8. Attendance: Since your surrogates at ABM chose to highlight Tom Emmer’s “absences” from the House of Representatives, please tell us why your “teaching career” in New York only involved 84 days in the classroom during a period when there were at least 240 days when school was in session?
9. More Paperwork!: What were the “personal reasons” for which you left the New York schools?   If someone were to say “because your likelihood of being drafted had dropped”, would you consider that accurate or inaccurate, and why?
10. Staff: Can you announce any prospective staff appointments?  Specifically, is there any truth to the rumor that Mike Hatch is going to be your Chief of Staff?

Now, that’s what I’d ask if I were a reporter.

But I’m not.  I’m just a guy in Saint Paul with a job and a mortgage and a couple of kids.  We have a class of High Priests of Information in this town, people sworn to the arcane code of the “Professional Journalist” whose job it is to ask these sorts of questions.

So will they?

Will Bill Salisbury use his position as “dean of Minnesota capitol correspondents” and his access to the campaign to ask any of these questions?

Will Tim Pugmire and Tom Scheck live up to MPR’s current “No Rant, No Slant” tagline, and get answers from Mark Dayton on these sorts of questions? (Let’s return to discuss Keri Miller, whose contempt for Tom Emmer oozes from every audible pore, some other time).

Will Rachel Stassen-Berger, scienne of a Minnesota family nearly as household-y as Dayton himself, decide that the public as a right to know any of these things – before the election, anyway, while people are paying attention?

Will David Brauer and Erik Black use the stated independence of their platform, the MinnPost, from the DFL and its media-political complex to enquire further?

Will the Minnesota “Independent” , the “Uptake” and “Common Cause”… er, ever have to register as 501(c)4 lobbying groups?

The regional leftybots are a-buzz over…

…some really, really mundane news.

Tom Emmer is  the subject of a legal malpractice lawsuit by a former client.

Given the typical leftyblogger’s understanding of the law, many of them are making a lot of this “story”.

However, the facts are these:

• Legal malpractice suits are far from uncommon.
• The vast majority that are filed are filed against lawyers that have malpractice insurance; while legal malpractice suits are quite difficult to win (because lawyers defend themselves pretty strenuously), most cases that actually are sent to trial involving lawyers that are insured get settled out of court.
• That’s presuming it gets to trial.  Most such cases, being filed over sour grapes over cases gone awry, or even just weak cases, are dismissed on summary judgment without ever seeing a jury.
• Many plaintiffs will use the threat of a malpractice suit to try to induce a quick settlement to avoid a public relations snag for the defendant and his/her firm.  This is especially true with higher-profile lawyers.
• And there is no more high-profile lawyer in Minnesota right now than Tom Emmer, attorney at law and, as the MNGOP’s endorsed candidate for governor in a very tight race, a guy with a lot of skin in the public relations game.

And, gosh golly, look at when the summary judgment hearing is scheduled (emphasis added):

OTHER EVENTS AND HEARINGS

09/17/2010 Summons and Complaint

09/17/2010 Certificate of Representation

09/17/2010 Notice and Acknowledgement of Service

09/17/2010 Notice of Motion and Motion

09/17/2010 Memorandum

09/17/2010 Affidavit-Other

09/17/2010 Affidavit-Other

09/17/2010 Affidavit-Other

09/17/2010 Affidavit of Mailing

09/21/2010 Notice of Case Filing

09/21/2010 Schedule Pre-Trial

09/24/2010 Affidavit-Other

09/24/2010 Affidavit of Service

11/08/2010 Motion Summary Judgment (10:00 AM) (Judicial Officer Halsey, Stephen M.)

Right after the election.

While there is no reason to believe that this case was filed by a political enemy of Emmer’s (the plaintiff is a businessman; businesspeople don’t care which party their customers are from, as long as the checks cash), it’s not unreasonable, given how legal malpractice cases work, to speculate that the timing makes perfect sense to the plaintiff.

If you’re a conservative who’s interested in this election, and hasn’t quite gotten the full grasp of the media’s perfidy in this election, I’m going to direct you to Sheila Kihne’s ‘The Activist Next Door” blog, which has turned into a daily must-read this past few weeks.

More new blogs like this, please.

The Uptake is a regional “videoblog”, featuring contributions from left-leaning “Citizen Journalists”.

I’ve written about them before; on the one hand, I know some of the people involved with The Uptake, and they have in the past sworn up and down that they want The Uptake to be a legit news source; they’ve put in some efforts in the past to try to accomplish that.  On the other hand, they’ve had a lot of bobblehead contributors and employees with strange ideas of what journalism is, or who want to use it as a vehicle for grinding personal or social axes.

They’re at it again:

The Uptake is pushing a video that they were denied access into a press event with Newt Gingrich today.

The Uptake “reporter” said to a MNGOP staffer they had spoken to MNGOP Communications Director Mark Drake and were credentialed for the event.  According to sources this is untrue.  The Uptake never contacted the RPM for access and thus were never credentialed for the event.

My own sources confirm; the conversation never happened.

There are some grownups at the Uptake.  Are they going to step up, one of these days?

Rachel Stassen-Berger, writing in the Strib yesterday:

Republican candidate for governor Tom Emmer is all over the new Republican theme — Democratic candidate Mark Dayton doesn’t have a complete budget plan.

Emmer hammered the point, made by supportive Republicans repeatedly during the past few days, on a Tuesday spot on Minnesota Public Radio.

“Let’s start talking about the elephant in the room that nobody wants to acknowledge. Sen. Dayton has proposed a plan that is billions of dollars short,” Emmer said. He went on to suggest that Dayton will have to increase taxes more folks than he’s specified — couples making taxable income of $150,000 and singles earning $130,000. “How far are you willing to go?”

Let’s extend that thought for a moment:  Mark Dayton is not a dumb guy.  And he’s got people on his campaign staff who are even smarter.  They don’t own a supercomputer – but they don’t need one to put together the broad outlines of a budget.  Their campaign isn’t short of staff or funding, obviously.

So if you think the only budget that the Dayton campaign has is the one that’s on the website – the one that grins a big dumb grin and says “we’re $890 million short” with the same seriousness of a junior high kid saying the dog ate his homework – then I have to say with all due respect that you’re beggaring reason.   Either the campaign is incompetent, or they know where that extra $890 million is coming from, and would rather the electorate not know.

And if you assume Democrats and Dayton aren’t just plain stupid, that leaves you with only “b”

“Put it on paper, Sen. Dayton,” Emmer said. (Republicans on Twitter and on blogs have taken to accusing individual reporters of negligence for not following suit.)

Stassen-Berger links to my Twitter account, as well as my “AWOL Media” piece yesterday.  I wouldn’t use the phrase “accusing of negligence”, really – it’s got a legalistic tinge to it that’s a little unseemly for free speech.

It just seems that the media, which six weeks ago were hot to get all the details of the Emmer budget, has suddenly gotten incredibly incurious.  And yet now that Dayton’s budget has a large, suspicious hole – and there really is no solution but to jack up taxes on the middle class – suddenly it seems that the people don’t have a “right to know”, accorinding to our regional political media.

I mean, did you see Esme Murphy?

She might as well have been giving the Senator a massage.  “Do you have any plans?”  Er, nope.  And it ended there!

Did you hear Keri Miller’s interview with Tom Emmer?  Back before Emmer released his budget?  She went after him like a barracuda after Charlie the Tuna.

Does the public – especially us middle-class schnook taxpayers – still have a right to know now that it’s the favorite son of Minnesota’s political “elite?”

I mean…:

Dayton has acknowledged that his budget plan comes up nearly $1 billion short. That’s in part because his income tax plan won’t bring in as much money as he had hoped. He has specified how he would make the cuts he’s found, although some are estimates and others have been deemedunrealistic. But he admits a “gap,” which leads opponents to believe he’ll raise more in taxes.

…I’m a complete schlemiel as a “reporter”, and even I see that these are some huge, valid questions!

So David Brauer – who’s never covered up his lefty sympathies, but seems to try to do a decent job anyway – asked via Twitter:

@mitchpberg regarding @Rachelsb & @MinnPost, does thishttp://bit.ly/c4f26t and thishttp://t.co/jj16mXx get them off your bad list?

He links to a this Rachel Stassen-Berger story in the Strib, and a Doug Grow piece in the MinnPost.  Stassen-Berger did, indeed, note that Dayton’s budget comes up short – but there’s no evidence that I’ve seen (I’m willing to be corrected!) that she’s gotten up at a Dayton presser and said “OK, Chauncey Fauntelroy, if you don’t have to hit the middle class, who do you have to get the $890 million?  We’ve got all day, Yale boy” (Those might be my words rather than Stassen-Berger’s).

Grow makes the valid point that…:

…no governor, no matter how popular, will be able to zip a budget package through the Legislature without major changes. In this case, whoever is governor likely will not be elected with a majority of the vote, meaning there will be little chance to claim any mandate, so you can expect nasty legislative fights.

…while basically claiming a pox on all their fiscal houses.

And, most importantly, both of these pieces were two weeks ago.  Juuuuust about the time that the non-wonk class – all those actual voters – started thinking about the election.

Which was why I took exception to Brauer’s followup tweet:

@mitchpberg Fair question. Would venture Dayton’s gap is well-known, covered and acknowledged. For many weeks, Emmer seemed to be ducking.

Well-known to whom?  Political reporters and political junkies and fire-breathing political bloggers?  Sure!

The average voter – especially the ones who start paying attention to politics sometime between the first and fifteenth of October?

Hell – I’ve talked with candidates for the State House who haven’t read anything about this yet.

So while I’m not going to say that our assembled mass of journalists are “negligent” for not asking, I’m still curious; when the public has a right to know, does it imply they’re supposed to exercise that right by developing a jones for research?

Look, journos; if your line is “all three of the candidates’ budgets leave questions”, then ask them.  That’s what you get the big bucks for.  Hell, I’d do it, if any of them (but Emmer) returned my calls!  And since neither of them do, I – and, more importantly, we, the entire body politic – have to depend on y’all, Tim Pugmire and Tom Scheck and Bill Salisbury and Rachel Stassen-Berger and Pat Kessler to do it.

Thing is, so far in the race, it’s Emmer that’s been getting the questioning; Dayton seems to be the only one who can get away with saying “I’ll get back to you on November 3”.

Am I wrong?

What say you, Tim and Rachel and Tom and Bill and Pat?

Remember in June and July?

When the Dayton Campaign, and their minimum-wage minions in the leftyblogosphere, demanded that Tom Emmer release his budget plan?

Because without an Emmer Budget Plan in place for their perusal, democracy itself was in mortal danger!

The entire media was in on it. of course.

Tom Scheck at MPR?  Yep.  He was asking.

Tim Pugmire at MPR?  Yep, he wanted the details, too.

Eric Black at the MNPost?  It was surely important to him!

The question certainly fascinated Rachel Stassen-Berger at the Strib!

Over the past five weeks, Tom Emmer has released a budget plan that balances the budget, and lays the groundwork for the kind of economic growth that actually sets economies up for the kind of long-term prosperity that makes budget fiascoes like the past four years dim, comic memories.

In the meantime, Mark Dayton’s first budget cratered – came up $3 Billion short – and his second attempt is well over a billion off the mark, and Dayton is now saying budgets don’t really matter that much anyway until he’s elected.

So I’m wondering – where are the media who were so strident about having a budget to fact-check last summer?

Rachel Stassen-Berger?  Tim Pugmire?  Tom Scheck?  Pat Kessler?  Bill Salisbury?  Eric Black?  David Brauer?

Where are all the great journalistic instincts of one of the nation’s putatively top-twenty media markets?

Or don’t the people have a right to know anymore?

Let’s start counting up days until someone in the regional mainstream media – MPR, the Strib, the PiPress, WCCO-TV, anyone covers the vaporous vacuity of the Dayton “budget plan”.

Good thing I don’t pay for ink, huh?